The Price-Setting Newsvendor with Poisson Demand

Schulte, Benedikt and Sachs, Anna-Lena (2020) The Price-Setting Newsvendor with Poisson Demand. European Journal of Operational Research, 283 (1). pp. 125-137. ISSN 0377-2217

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Abstract

The price-setting newsvendor (PSN) model has received considerable attention since it was first introduced by Whitin (1955). However, the existing publications that study this model consistently assume the existence of a continuous density function of demand. In this paper, we study the PSN model with Poisson demand — that is, a discrete demand distribution without density function. The Poisson PSN has an important property, it combines price-dependency of variance and coefficient of variation of the (standard) additive and multiplicative models: demand variance decreases and the coefficient of variation increases in the selling price. We develop an analytical solution approach that covers a broad class of demand models, including linear and logit demand, explain how to apply our approach to more general demand functions via piece-wise linear approximation, and develop analytical and numerical insights. We characterize the behavior of the optimal price and we analyze the performance gap of different price-setting heuristics. Among other insights, we observe some instances in which a significant share of profits would be lost if the discrete nature of demand were not modeled explicitly. To help companies overcome this risk, we present an easily applicable decision rule with which to determine when to use simple heuristics and when to solve the associated discrete optimization problem.

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
European Journal of Operational Research
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/2600/2611
Subjects:
?? inventorynewsvendor modelpricingpoisson demandmodelling and simulationmanagement science and operations researchinformation systems and management ??
ID Code:
138927
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
13 Nov 2019 13:25
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
15 Jul 2024 20:07